People say “what goes around comes around”, EM Foster says “only connect” and Anthony Powell wrote Dance to the Music of Time to make the same point at somewhat greater length; a saga with which I struggled a bit early on, but once WW II came along I was hooked.
The unifying feature of the twelve volume series is the observant narrator who only minimally participates, based of course on Powell himself. I must digress to tell you my favourite character: Pamela Flitton. I was mighty disappointed when she expired towards the end of book eleven. Powell is thought to have based her on Barbara Skelton but I see more than a dash of Pamela Harriman too. That Pamela had the distinction of being described as une grande horizontale on the front page of one of the broadsheets when she was safely dead.
The unifying feature of today’s post is somebody I have never met. I know her parents and her brother – he is married to Sam Cam’s sister and co-founded a successful restaurant. You know when you get to a good bit in a book how the plot switches to something else and you are left itching to know more?
I was having a tuna and cucumber baguette for lunch on Saturday perched on a stool at Pret in Waterloo Station waiting for a train that I never caught. I looked down on the concourse and noticed above the platform gates huge screens. They advertised a new Sky Atlantic series, Patrick Melrose, and it reminded me that I haven’t read the last book of the five volume series by Edward St Aubyn. Not having a TV or a Sky subscription I will have to hope that the programmes will be available as a box set next winter.
In 2012 the fourth in the Patrick Melrose series was made into a film, Mother’s Milk. Patrick’s wife is played by Annabel Mullion who you see at the top of this post sitting, well lying down, for Lucian Freud. I suppose even the most successful actresses have longueurs (don’t you hate spell check, it wants me to write “long ears”) and posing for Lucian Freud is a better filler than most.
To give some inkling of the breadth of Dancers, when it was made into a TV series in 1997 104 actors are listed in the cast. And a starry cast it is too: Simon Russell Beale, Edward Fox, Alan Bennett, John Gielgud, Oliver Ford Davies, Eileen Atkins, John Standing, Zoë Wanamaker, Miranda Richardson (Pamela Flitton) and many more big beasts of stage and screen including Annabel Mullion who plays Mona Templer in three episodes, a character supposed to be based on Sonia Orwell.
Why I got off the train before it departed on Saturday is a story for another day; one of those irritating loose ends.
Couldn’t agree more on spell-check! I have disabled it on my phone, which means correspondents often have to puzzle through non-sequiturs due to my dreadful typing on a tiny keyboard. But better that than having everything maddeningly “corrected” to whatever an algorithm has determined is most popular.
Yes! as well on Powell. I read it so rapidly long ago that I have retained mostly just an impression of the foetid atmosphere between the wars, with everyone waiting.
Whenever someone teased about our former Ambassadress in Paris, I was pleased to remember that she was born a(n) “Hon.” (in the Nancy sense, not the Decca one), a naturalized gift to the United States from across the Atlantic. Whatever one may think of her political hostessing or her merits, otherwise, she was of a type and an age that we likely won’t see again, at least not in the developed West.
I have a good Pamela Digby story from her time in Washington DC. Remind me to tell you when we meet next month at the Mansion House.